Photograph by Irv Schankman, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis
This is the intersection of Manchester Road and Sutton Boulevard. Monarch was in this very building, long after the cat—with his neon whiskers and neon bow tie—disappeared. That kitty, in a more cherubic form, smiled from cans of Katz beer (79 cents cold, 69 cents warm), Katz flashbulbs, Katz jumbo salted peanuts, Katz coffee, and Katz powdered sulfur. Katz also had pet spider monkeys and baby alligators; film-developing kits; bridge lamps; Toujours Moi perfume and Van Ess hair tonic; a shoe-repair shop; a photo booth; bins of 45s; pinball machines; and a soda fountain that sold lime ices to go (you could keep the glass for a few cents extra). And it carried patent medicines like Wampole’s Preparation, and of course, filled prescriptions. Back then, druggists measured chemical powders from little drawers and cabinets, grinding them together with a mortar and pestle, and you could custom-order your cough-syrup flavor. Katz started as a cigar stand next to Kansas City’s Union Station, but bloomed into a Midwestern chain when Isaac and Michael Katz fixed on that magic formula—cheapness and muchness—that Walmart perfected. People used to wander into Katz drugstores during the Depression, just to comfort themselves with the plenty: pyramids of tobacco tins, rows of lipsticks and celluloid dolls, sleds and magazines, soap flakes, tooth powders, roach bait, candy bars, mustard plasters…all at “cut-rate” prices that anyone could afford. By the ’50s, the opening of a new Katz Drug Store was an event, with marching bands, circus acts, newspaper photographers—Elvis even played the parking lot of a Katz in Memphis. But in 1970, “the everything store” merged with the horrible-sounding Skaggs Drug Centers, which in turn merged with Osco, which merged with CVS. That store doesn’t grind its own medicines, and doesn’t truck in sulfur or alligators, though you can still get giant cans of store-brand
salted peanuts.
